Here’s Your First Look at Windows 8.1

After just 7 months on the market, Microsoft is already rolling out an update to Windows 8. Photo: Noah Devereaux/Wired

Windows 8.1 is getting real improvements over Windows 8, some of which will please longtime users who found the shift from Windows 7 jarring or uncomfortable. And yet it also goes even farther in the new direction Microsoft is taking.

The update, which Microsoft is showing off in a preview today, remains touch-forward, while making more concessions to keyboard and mouse users. It’s designed to work better on smaller screens, and large desktop displays as well. It makes much greater use of features like Search and SkyDrive, and tries even harder to be a truly Internet-driven platform. But it also makes getting to your installed apps easier, and swapping from the desktop to the Start screen a more grounded experience. The Start button is back (sort of) but there’s no Start Menu.

The most fundamentally important new features are the revisions to Search and SkyDrive. The one that will get the most attention, however, is the Start button that now uses the Windows logo and remains visible at all times in the taskbar if you’re working in desktop mode.

Microsoft says it built these changes based upon its existing product roadmap and info gleaned by studying what users actually were doing with their Windows 8 machines. Among the vast amount of telemetry data it collected, it found the built-in Search function was used by more than 90 percent of users. So it made it easier to access. You can launch it now by hitting the Windows key plus the S key; no need to go in through the Charms. But it also rebuilt the way it works now too, to make deep use of the Web and application data. It’s basically a universal search box.

Image: Microsoft

A query for Marilyn Monroe, for example, returns biographical data, her Wikipedia entry, photos, results from the News app, and links to media like videos and songs, as well as related searches. It presents all this in what it calls a “Search Hero” — essentially a side-scrolling presentation that lays out what it thinks you’ll most want to see, in a visually striking manner complete with a hero image. Following all that are basic Web results from Bing. A more generic search — one that starts by typing “Sk”, for example, — begins to prompt the user with installed apps and data (Skype, SkyDrive, documents on the user’s hard drive and in SkyDrive) as well as web search suggestions, like SkyFall. Search for Seattle and you’ll get maps and city guide information. Drill down and search for the Space Needle and you’ll not only get information on it, but even geotagged photos in SkyDrive that were taken there.

Speaking of SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage service, it’s far more integrated than it was even in Windows 8, which already made great use of it. Every file has the option to save to your device or SkyDrive, the latter syncs to the cloud so they are available on every logged in device. Because the API itself exposes the SkyDrive save option, application developers can easily take advantage of it — there’s nothing extra to do to store files and settings there. In order to keep devices from filling up, files that aren’t explicitly synced for offline access are handled by what the company calls “placeholders,” essentially file names and icons that are visible and searchable but aren’t actually stored on the device.

Microsoft is giving users 7GB of data for free, with the option to purchase up to 100GB. (Go over that limit and Microsoft says it will send gentle reminders to get back under the limit, with ample time to do so.) In terms of security, it uses two step authentication, turned on by default, with options to send codes to SMS, email or an authenticator app.

Multitasking also received a major overhaul. One of the knocks on Modern UI apps is that, when run on the desktop, they meant you often have lots of unused space — even when running two apps at once in a Snap state. Now, on large desktop screens, you can run up to four applications at once. Anytime one application launches a second one, that second app launches in Snap view. If there are only two apps running, both run at 50 percent width of the screen by default. If you’re on a larger monitor, however, you can launch a third and even a fourth in smaller columns. You can also resize columns. Overall, it means you can get a lot more information on the same screen, even when running Modern UI apps.

The last really noticeable change, although it is more of a cosmetic one than a deep under-the-hood adjustment, is an overhaul meant to make navigating easier for traditional Windows users. In Windows 8, the icon in the lower left of the screen that takes you to the Start Screen only appears when you mouse or gesture to summon it–even in desktop mode. That’s changed. First, it looks more like the traditional Start button. The mini-Start screen icon has been replaced by an icon of the Windows logo. It’s more easily knowable if you are new to Windows 8, or firmly entrenched in your Windows usage patterns. And when in the desktop mode, it’s always visible in the task bar, right where it’s always been. There’s no need to summon it. You can also adjust the settings so that instead of launching the Start screen, you can launch an all-apps view that’s sortable by groups, or most frequently used. And because you can set the background picture on both the desktop and Start screen to be the same now, swapping between the two isn’t quite as jarring.

Windows 8.1 Preview. Image: Microsoft

The Start Screen itself has gotten some navigational overhauls as well. Tiles can now be both much larger and smaller. A large weather tile might show the current conditions in three cities at once, for example. An icon that isn’t displaying any data, on the other hand, can be set to just-over-fingertip sized. They can also be rearranged by selecting and dragging multiple apps at once to form a new group, go into an existing group, or even be uninstalled.

There’s a lot more too. You can take a photo right from the lock screen, adjust all your PC Settings in one place, the onscreen keyboard has gotten an overhaul to make it easier to use, applications are updated automatically.

It’s a lot to digest, especially for a preview version. While it may not appease all the criticisms of Windows 8, it does have much to offer in terms of a streamlined experience. If you’d found that version too radically different, this one certainly makes inroads into familiar territory.